Make Your Point > Archived Issues > OUBLIETTE
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pronounce
OUBLIETTE:
Say it "OO blee YET."
To hear it, click here.
connect this word to others:
Our word oubliette (meaning "a dungeon you fall into through a trap door") is cousins with the word obli____s (meaning "totally unaware of what's happening around you").
As in, "Sarah, obli____s to the danger, fell straight down into the oubliette, and, presumably, would never be seen or heard from again."
Can you recall that word with the blanks? Both that one and oubliette come from oblivisci, Latin for "forget."
(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)
definition:
We took the word "oubliette" straight from French, but you can trace it all the way back to the Latin oblivisci, meaning "to forget."
An oubliette is a secret dungeon with only one entrance: a trapdoor in the floor.
In the fairly appropriate words of Hoggle from the movie Labyrinth, an oubliette is "a place you put people... to forget about 'em!" Here's Sarah, having fallen into the oubliette:
Somehow Hoggle finds her in there: "Nice young girl. Terrible, black oubliette!"
(You could argue that the oubliette in that movie really wasn't one--it had another exit. You can't just walk out of a real oubliette.)
Anyway, more figuratively, an oubliette is anything that reminds you of some deep, dark, inescapable dungeon.
So, we could define a figurative oubliette as permanent storage, or as a situation that traps you forever, or feels like it'll trap you forever.
grammatical bits:
Part of speech: noun, the countable kind: "it's an oubliette," "watch out for that oubliette."
Other forms:
The plural is "oubliettes."
To get creative, use "oubliette" as a verb. That's rare, though. Here's Tennyson: "keep her...oublietted."
how to use it:
This rare word, with its French sound and historical flavor, might be perfect when you need to express how deep, dark, cruel, barbaric, hopeless, and inescapable some situation is.
For example, various writers have used "oubliette" to refer to slavery, social stigmas, and life imprisonment without parole.
You might talk about stumbling down into an oubliette, suffering in an oubliette, looking for a way out of an oubliette, locking up some memory in an oubliette, etc.
examples:
"Ignore the laundry. Let the novel open like an oubliette under your feet. It feels dense at first, a bit like drowning, without a period or paragraph break in sight. But a rhythm asserts itself..."
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times, 3 September 2019
"Clarence felt his voice giving out, closing up. The effort to push words out into the great space of the church...was taxing his chest; his lungs felt to be heaving within him...and now his throat felt catastrophically closed, his breath reduced to a trickle, a wheeze...For moments that approached eternity he hung there, in the pulpit, his mouth ajar...His lips were able to move even in the midst of this curious disgrace, this oubliette that had risen up around him with its slippery invisible walls. His cheeks felt hot, but his fingertips felt cold, and a shiver kept passing uncontrollably across his chest."
— John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel, 1996
has this page helped you understand "oubliette"?
study it:
Explain the meaning of "oubliette" without saying "vault" or "prison."
try it out:
Talk about an experience in your life that seemed, or felt, like falling into an oubliette.
That is: you stumbled into it, it was startling or shocking or disorienting, and, ever since, it's held you captive or defined your worldview. Maybe it's a certain career, a relationship, an expensive hobby, or a relentless obsession.
And are you miserable there, or perfectly content?
before you review, play:
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
This month, our game is called "Recollections."
In each issue, I'll share a quote from some work--it might be a song, a poem, or a book--and you'll come up with that work's title. You can assemble the title, highlighted in the vertical blue line below, by recalling words to fit into the puzzle. Scrap paper might help!
From the previous issue:
"The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single star relieved the darkness behind the glass."
Those words appear in the novel Solaris, by Stanisław Lem.
If you'd like to review any of the words from the puzzle, give them a click: saboteur, zealot, table, gaffe, yammer, quagmire, Kafkaesque. (If instead of "yammer," you supplied "jabber," that works, too!)
Try this one today:
"Like love from a drunken sky,
Confetti falling down all night."
In what work does the quote above appear?
1) plural noun: "complicated, sneaky plans"
2) adjective: "so sweet that it's annoying"
3) adjective: "empty of any creativity or interest"
4) verb: "to make something hard to understand, as if by darkening it"
5) verb: "to express harsh disapproval, as if you're dragging someone under your ship"
6) verb: "to lose your courage, as if you're flinching, shaking, or drawing back in fear"
7) adjective: "showing a fear or hatred of foreign or strange people or things"
8) noun: "a crazy extremeness or a furious intensity, suggesting a foaming at the mouth"
9) noun: "something that interrupts and ruins something else, like a sore inside the body"
10) adjective: "understood, but not talked about"
11) noun: "the mood or spirit of a particular time in history"
12) adjective: "disgusting, horrible, and deserving of hate"
review this word:
A. FRISSON (a quick, sudden shiver of strong emotion).
B. BATTALION (a large, powerful, organized group of people).
C. PANOPTICON (a place you imprison people and monitor them all the time).
2. If I learned anything from Neil Gaiman, it's that dragons can be defeated. And if I learned anything from Indiana Jones, it's that oubliettes can be _____.
A. wrestled and tamed
B. sauntered right out of
C. whipped into submission
a final word:
I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.
I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.
From my blog:
36 ways to study words.
Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
To be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.
Disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.
Our word oubliette (meaning "a dungeon you fall into through a trap door") is cousins with the word obli____s (meaning "totally unaware of what's happening around you").
We took the word "oubliette" straight from French, but you can trace it all the way back to the Latin oblivisci, meaning "to forget."
Part of speech: noun, the countable kind: "it's an oubliette," "watch out for that oubliette."
This rare word, with its French sound and historical flavor, might be perfect when you need to express how deep, dark, cruel, barbaric, hopeless, and inescapable some situation is.
"Ignore the laundry. Let the novel open like an oubliette under your feet. It feels dense at first, a bit like drowning, without a period or paragraph break in sight. But a rhythm asserts itself..."
Explain the meaning of "oubliette" without saying "vault" or "prison."
Talk about an experience in your life that seemed, or felt, like falling into an oubliette.
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
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